German opposition leader Friedrich Merz’s conservatives were on course for a lackluster victory in a national election Sunday, while Alternative for Germany nearly doubled its support, the strongest showing for a far-right party since World War II, projections showed.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz conceded defeat for his center-left Social Democrats after what he called “a bitter election result.”
Projections for ARD and ZDF public television showed his party finishing in third place with its worst postwar result in a national parliamentary election.
It wasn’t immediately clear how easy it will be for Merz to put together a coalition government.
The election took place seven months earlier than originally planned after Scholz’s unpopular coalition collapsed in November, three years into a term that was increasingly marred by infighting. There was widespread discontent and not much enthusiasm for any of the candidates.
The projections, based on exit polls and partial counting, put support for Merz’s Union bloc at just under 29% and Alternative for Germany, or AfD, about 20% — roughly double its result from 2021.
They put support for Scholz’s Social Democrats at just over 16%, far lower than in the last election. The environmentalist Greens, their remaining partners in the outgoing government, were on 12-13%.
Out of three smaller parties, one — the hard-left Left Party — appeared certain to win seats in parliament with up to 9% of the vote. Two other parties, the pro-business Free Democrats and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, hovered around the threshold of the 5% support needed to win seats.
Whether Merz will need one or two partners to form a coalition will depend on how many parties get into parliament.
“I am aware of the responsibility,” Merz said. “I am also aware of the scale of the task that now lies ahead of us. I approach it with the utmost respect, and I know that it will not be easy.”
“The world out there isn’t waiting for us, and it isn’t waiting for long-drawn-out coalition talks and negotiations,” he told cheering supporters. “We must now become capable of acting quickly again.”
AfD’s candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, said that “we have become the second-strongest force.”
She said that her party is “open for coalition negotiations” with Merz’s party, and that “otherwise, no change of policy is possible in Germany.” But Merz has repeatedly and categorically ruled out working with AfD, as have other mainstream parties.
The Social Democrats’ general secretary, Matthias Miersch, suggested that the defeat was no surprise after three years of the unpopular government. “This election wasn’t lost in the last eight weeks,” he said.
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The election was dominated by worries about the years-long stagnation of Europe’s biggest economy and with pressure to curb migration. It took place against a background of growing uncertainty over the future of Ukraine and Europe’s alliance with the United States.
Germany is the most populous country in the 27-nation European Union and a leading member of NATO. It has been Ukraine’s second-biggest weapons supplier, after the U.S. It will be central to shaping the continent’s response to the challenges of the coming years, including the Trump administration’s confrontational foreign and trade policy.
More than 59 million people in the nation of 84 million were eligible to elect the 630 members of the lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, who will take their seats under the glass dome of Berlin’s landmark Reichstag building.
Why is support for AfD surging?
AfD first entered Germany’s national parliament eight years ago on the back of discontent with the arrival of large numbers of migrants in the mid-2010s, and curbing migration remains its signature theme.
But the party has proven adept at harnessing discontent with other issues, too: Germany’s move away from fossil fuels, restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic and support for Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion nearly three years ago.
The party was founded in 2013 and initially focused on opposition to bailouts for struggling countries in the eurozone debt crisis — measures that then-Chancellor Angela Merkel described as “without alternative.”
Over the years, AfD became more radical and repeatedly changed leaders. It was Merkel’s decision in 2015 to allow in large numbers of migrants that supercharged it as a political force. In the 2017 national election, it won 12.6% of the vote, to take seats in the German parliament for the first time.
After returning to parliament in 2021 with reduced support of 10.3%, AfD picked up strength as Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left government bickered through a series of crises and finally collapsed.
Germany saw a wave of protests a year ago triggered by a report that right-wing extremists met to discuss the deportation of millions of immigrants, including some with German citizenship, and that AfD members were present.
But that didn’t do long-term poll damage to AfD. It finished second in the European Parliament election in June, and in September, the best-known figure on its hardest-right wing, Björn Höcke, secured the first far-right win in a state election in post-World War II Germany.
AfD went into Sunday’s election with renewed confidence and radical language, and polls put it in second place with about 20% support. Weidel, its first candidate for chancellor, has embraced the politically loaded term “remigration” as the party calls for large-scale deportations of people with no legal entitlement to be in Germany.
AfD calls for the immediate lifting of sanctions against Russia and opposes weapons deliveries to Ukraine. It wants Germany to reintroduce a national currency and for the European Union to become a looser “association of European nations,” though it isn’t explicitly advocating leaving the 27-nation bloc.
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has the party under observation for suspected right-wing extremism. The AfD’s branches in three eastern states are designated “proven right-wing extremist” groups. AfD strongly objects to those assessments and rejects any association with the Nazi past. Höcke has appealed two convictions for knowingly using a Nazi slogan at a political event.
AfD has support across Germany and is represented in all but two of the 16 state legislatures, but the party is strongest in the formerly communist and less prosperous east.
It has a unique ability to seize on issues “that other parties don’t handle with this clarity, with this intensity, with this radicalism and this emotionality,” said Wolfgang Schroeder, a political science professor at the Berlin Social Science Center. “And on top of that, it’s an internet party and from the beginning used the emotionalizing power of the internet for its own communication — much better than all other German parties together.”
That has helped it to perform strongly among young voters in recent regional elections. The party portrays itself as an anti-establishment force at a time of low trust in politicians.
Schroeder described it as “something like an aircraft carrier for resentment and anger.”
AfD’s rise has coincided with that of far-right parties in many other European countries, including Austria’s Freedom Party and the National Rally in France, with which it has plenty of common ground. Orbán this month described Weidel as “ the future of Germany.”
However, it isn’t part of those parties’ Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament after some tensions before last year’s EU election. AfD was thrown out of one of the group’s predecessors after its leading candidate at the time, Maximilian Krah, said that not all Nazi SS men “were necessarily criminals.”
Musk, a tech billionaire and close ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, has declared that “only the AfD can save Germany.” He held a live chat on X with Weidel and appeared live by video link at an AfD campaign rally.
At that rally, Weidel vowed to “make Germany great again” in an echo of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.
Nine days before the election, Vance met with Weidel after a speech to the Munich Security Conference in which he lectured European leaders about democracy and free speech and declared that “there’s no room for firewalls.” Mainstream German parties’ refusal to work with AfD is often referred to as the “firewall.”